Nationwide homepage down as servers ‘overload’ - updated

Red faces at building society as customers give up trying to see their accounts

Nationwide Building Society’s web homepage went offline this morning after its servers apparently failed to cope with the volume of data.

Customers attempting to access Nationwide.co.uk, in order to see their internet banking or other information, were greeted with the message “Server is too busy”.

The home page went offline around 11.10am, and returned over two hours later.

A Nationwide spokesperson said: “We take any customer experience that falls below our acceptable standards very seriously and have undertaken a full investigation,” he said.

Nationwide customers who had saved a bookmark of the internet banking login page were still able to go directly to that page and access their accounts however, as much of the rest of the site appears to be working.

In 2009, the building society suffered another site outage, which left its online banking inaccessible for a day.

Nationwide last year said it was virtualising 500 servers in its datacentre, with the aim of cutting £8 million from operational and energy costs. It has not been disclosed whether those changes played any part in the current problems.

Elsewhere, the building society is also undergoing a £300 million business transformation programme, under which it is moving to SAP service oriented architecture technology to improve business processes. In the programme, called Voyager, it is working with IBM, Capgemini and KPMG.

The homepage outage comes a month after Halfords' website went offline for more than a day, after it encountered problems around renewing its domain name.